Bourgeois Enlightenment traded freedom for self-preservation early on

Evidence

Now it appeared that the very existence of contradictions, or at least the consciousness of their existence, was in jeopardy, even though capitalism had not been superseded by socialism. In what Marcuse was later to make famous as “one-dimensional” society, the redeeming power of negation was almost totally absent. What was left in its place was a cruel parody of the dream of positive freedom. The Enlightenment, which had sought to liberate man, had ironically served to enslave him with far more effective means than ever before. Without a clear mandate for action, the only course open to those who could still escape the numbing power of the culture industry was to preserve and cultivate the vestiges of negation that still remained. “Philosophical theory itself cannot bring it about that either the barbarizing tendency or the humanistic outlook should prevail in the future,” Horkheimer warned. “However, by doing justice to those images and ideas that at given times dominated reality in the role of absolutes - e.g., the idea of the individual as it dominated the bourgeois era - and that have been relegated in the course of history, philosophy can function as a corrective of history, so to speak.” — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 833 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Enlightenment can be redeemed from blind domination by self-critique; The eighteenth century equated individuality with freedom and assumed natural human equality — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 650; Bourgeois ethics inherits Enlightenment’s truth-postulate as the demand to be oneself. (+10 more)

Broader Connections

• Bourgeois ethics inherits Enlightenment’s truth-postulate as the demand to be oneself. #corroborates (0.80)
• The eighteenth century equated individuality with freedom and assumed natural human equality #contradicts (0.75) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 650
• Enlightenment reason is fundamentally a project of self-preservation through mastery of nature #corroborates (0.75)
• The Enlightenment liberated man only to enslave him more effectively #expands (0.75) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 833
• Modern individualism shifted from freedom-as-such to the value of being this specific irreplaceable self #expands (0.70) — Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 2844
• Eighteenth-century individualism turned freedom-inequality tension into an ethical and religious paradox #expands (0.70) — Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 2619
• The system’s celebrated freedoms function as instruments of domination #expands (0.70) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 45
• Enlightenment reason replicated the tyranny it rebelled against, now over nature #contradicts (0.70) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 182
• Unlimited individual freedom breeds new repression through natural inequality #qualifies (0.70) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 534